


stole me a dog eared map, called for you everywhere

by Ninyaaaaaaah



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Ghost John Laurens, M/M, Sort Of, i don't really even know what this is, weird lams thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-03-09 03:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13473195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ninyaaaaaaah/pseuds/Ninyaaaaaaah
Summary: Alex hears the voice for the first time in a dream.He’s eighteen and there’s smoke and sunrise and everything burns red and hot and vital and Alex hears it, over and over.





	stole me a dog eared map, called for you everywhere

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "flightless bird, american mouth" by iron and wine.
> 
> i listened to a cover of this by alice someone or other on repeat while writing this fic.

He hears the voice for the first time in a dream.

He’s eighteen and there’s smoke and sunrise and everything burns red and hot and vital and Alex hears it, over and over.

_”I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”_

When he wakes up he feels like someone has blown a hole through his ribcage, and all he can remember is that voice like honey and heartache whispering apologies through the night, over and over and over again.

-

He’d know it anywhere, that voice. 

It’s all he has, at night, when he closes his eyes and lies next to a girl who pretends she understands. He closes his eyes and he listens to her breathe until he falls asleep. He listens to her breathe until he falls asleep and then he listens to that voice like honey and heartache, that voice that makes him think of gravel and dust and drowning. That voice whispering ‘I’m sorry’, again and again and again. That voice catching on a sob, that voice reaching for something, yearning for something.

Alex isn’t sure when he started yearning back.

Alex isn’t sure when he started wondering what that voice would sound like saying something that isn’t an apology.

Alex isn’t sure when he started trying to picture what the person behind the voice would look like but he knows his eyes are hazel and he knows he’s sun kissed and spattered in freckles, somehow, even though the sun never shines when he’s around.

-

Alex starts reading about lucid dreaming, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t make his mouth form words in his sleep, can’t pry his tongue from the roof of his mouth, can’t pull his lips back from his teeth.

-

When Alex looks in the mirror, he starts to imagine hazel eyes and freckled skin looking back at him, and he has to shake his head to clear the image.

Eliza starts to look at him like she’s scared for him. Eliza starts to look at him like she’s scared of him.

Alex presses his forehead to the mirror and he wishes for answers and he wishes he would stop waking up in the morning with salt stained cheeks and a mouthful of ‘I’m sorry’. Alex wishes for silence.

-

 _”Is that really what you want?”_ the voice asks him.

Alex dreams of dust and fire and sun speckled skin. He dreams of jade and hazel and the wind through golden wheat fields.

 _”No,”_ he whispers. Gets his tongue unglued for the very first time.

A shiver runs through the dream, hot and cold and desperate.

-

He shows up in the mirror, first.

Alex would know those bewitching pale eyes anywhere, even if he’s never seen them before. That spattering of freckles, that wounded mouth.

Alex sits still and stares, he leans forwards, reaches out and touches the cold glass over a bare, freckled shoulder. Hazel eyes close, and a shudder passes through a wiry body and it makes Alex’s breath catch in his throat.

Alex can’t breathe properly again until those eyes open again, until that sweet mouth gives him the ghost of a crooked smile.

-

“I think I’m going crazy,” Alex says to Eliza when she finds him staring at his own reflection.

“Do you think maybe it’s time to talk to someone, Alex?” She asks after a long moment of silence. Her long fingered hand rests on his shoulder, warm.

“No,” Alex says, and it comes out fierce and hot and smoke flavoured.

-

Alex dreams of drowning alone.

-

Alex wakes up drenched in sweat and tears. The room is lit with the soft glow of a hundred tiny fairy lights that Eliza hung over the bed. She sleeps soundly, her body curled away from him in a soft comma. He stares at her for a long moment, watches the peaceful rise and fall of her chest, watches the low light on the cupid’s bow of her lip and the brush of her lashes against her cheek. 

He wants to lie down with his chest to her back and close his eyes and dream of fairy light, but then he thinks of that gunsmoke voice asking him if that’s really what he wants…

He’s standing up before he’s even answered ‘no’.

-

Alex loses track of the hours he spends staring into a mirror where his reflection used to be. 

“What’s your name?” he whispers, touching his fingers to cold glass where a bottom lip should be. Feels the resulting shudder as if it’s his own, and watches those eyes slide shut.

-

When Alex steps out of the shower, the word “John” is scrawled in messy cursive in the fog on the bathroom mirror. 

“John,” Alex says out loud. Soft. Reverent. 

Something inside him shatters at the way the name feels on his tongue, like it’s a promise he hadn’t known was broken until he said it out loud. He sinks to the cold tile floor and covers his face with his hands, and he shakes and shakes and shakes and wonders just how much one person can cry without really knowing why.

-

“John?” he asks, next time he sees that face in the mirror. 

Those hazel eyes close, and a shudder runs through him that shakes Alex’s bones. He nods, and there’s something in his expression that Alex can’t place, but John turns his head away before Alex can identify it, jaw tight, eyes closed. 

-

The day after that, he looks at his own ink eyes in the mirror, and it feels strange to watch his reflection move when he moves. It feels strange to touch the cool glass and not feel like something he doesn’t quite understand is falling to pieces. 

-

Eliza spends the night at her own apartment. 

Alex wakes up with a howl of anguish trapped in his throat and a pillow soaked in tears. He wakes with the taste of smoke and whiskey on his tongue. He kicks the covers off his sweat soaked body and wonders how someone can dream of fire and drowning all at the same time. 

_”I’m so sorry.”_

John’s voice, but Alex isn’t dreaming. John’s voice, but it’s right here in the room with him. John’s voice, but Alex is awake.

Alex sits up, the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention.

“What. What are you sorry for, John?” he asks his empty bedroom.

_”I didn’t make it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it here.”_

Alex stares at his empty hands and swallows something that tastes like river water.

-

“What are you?” Alex asks the mirror.

John looks down at himself and then back at Alex. There’s that something again in his pale eyes that Alex doesn’t have a name for. He shrugs, and offers Alex what Alex thinks is supposed to be a smile. 

“My name is Alexander,” Alex says.

John smiles a real smile, and it breaks Alex’s heart. He nods.

“You knew?” Alex asks.

John nods again.

“Do you know why I keep dreaming of fire and drowning?” Alex asks.

John looks stricken again. He nods, and there’s that something again that Alex has no name for. He turns away, but Alex thinks he sees a shimmer of tears in John’s eyes, and he presses his palm to the mirror over John’s bare shoulder blade. 

“John wait!” He says, fear clutching his heart, sudden and sharp. 

He watches the way John’s freckled skin shudders under his hand, like he can feel it. Like he’s in pain.

“Does it hurt when I touch you?” He asks.

John shakes his head, dark curls bobbing. He flickers, and Alex thinks maybe he hears a sob, and then he’s looking at his own reflection blinking back at him. 

-

Alex’s dreams don’t change. Always fire and smoke and drowning, dust and wheat. He wakes up with the taste of river water and apologies thick on his tongue.

-

The next time he wakes up in the middle of the night with tears streaming down his face, John is sitting in Eliza’s spot in the bed, bare legs tucked neatly beneath himself. He looks less real on this side of the mirror. He looks washed out, translucent.

“John,” Alex breathes in wonder.

John smiles, and it lights up Alex’s heart. 

-

Eliza keeps asking Alex to get help.

Alex keeps telling her no.

She starts turning away when his sobs wake her up and he has no words to tell her why it feels like he’s drowned a million times, why it feels like there’s been a hole blown through his chest. 

-

“What do you mean, you couldn’t get here?” Alex asks the fairy lights that still hang above his bed, even though Eliza doesn’t sleep here anymore, most nights. 

_”I couldn’t. I couldn’t get here. I didn’t make it.”_ John’s voice says.

Alex can’t see him, can’t even really pinpoint where the voice is coming from. All he knows is the only time he doesn’t feel like the space between his bones is empty is when he can hear John’s voice. 

“But you are here, aren’t you?” Alex asks, hands behind his head. 

_”mmm, in a sense,”_ says John’s voice. 

-

When John does appear, he doesn’t speak. 

He watches Alex from the mirror, or from the bed, or from Alex’s desk where he sits with his bare legs swinging and that thing Alex can’t name plain in his eyes. 

Alex wants to touch him, but something tells him he shouldn’t. 

Alex _aches_ in a way he’s never known before, like nothing will ever make him feel whole again. 

-

Eliza asks him one last time to get help.

Alex says no.

“Wishing for something doesn’t make it so, Alex,” she says softly, and she walks away.

-

Alex dreams of river water, tugging him down, filling his lungs. 

When he wakes up, John is right there beside him.

He reaches out and tries to touch him. A second before his fingers touch John’s cheek, John’s eyes close. He shudders, a full body shudder that makes Alex’s heart clench. 

Before Alex’s fingers make contact, he’s gone.

He closes his eyes and he thinks of the river and he thinks, maybe, he’s starting to understand. 

-

“You drowned in a river, didn’t you? You’re dead, aren’t you?” Alex asks John’s face in the mirror. 

John nods, and it’s Alex’s turn to shudder. 

“Why do I keep dreaming about it?”

Instead of answering, John disappears. 

Alex thinks about water, and how it keeps taking from him. 

-

_”It wasn’t… it wasn’t supposed to be like that. I was supposed to go off and do something great. Go to war. Get killed fighting for something that means something. It was supposed to be worth something.”_

Alex lies on his bed with his eyes closed and listens to John’s voice. It’s the closest thing to peace he’s ever felt. It’s the closest thing to whole he’s ever felt. 

_”Instead I drank too much whiskey and drowned in the river.”_

“Okay, okay. But like, why does it have to mean anything. Dead is still just dead at the end. And why do I keep dreaming about it?” Alex asks. He drags a hand over his face. He can’t really tell when he’s asleep and when he’s awake anymore. He doesn’t know when he last ate, or what. 

_”Because I was supposed to get here. Our paths should have crossed with both of us still breathing. We should have met, we should have fallen in love, and I… I shouldn’t have come here but I had to see you, just once.”_

Alex is tired of water and he’s tired of tears but that doesn’t stop them from coming. 

_”I… I’m sorry Alex. I’m sorry I didn’t make it here in time. I’m sorry I came at all. I’m sorry I wasn’t strong enough to leave, once I did.”_

-

Alex knows, now. That emotion on John’s face. The one that rests heavy in his pale eyes.

The one Alex can’t name.

Grief.

-

Alex lies on his back on the bed and stares at the top of John’s head. His arms are out to the sides, fingers curled loosely around nothing. 

John is sprawled on his chest, cheek to heartbeat, hazel eyes closed tight. He shudders every few minutes.

Alex stares at the top of his head and wishes he could feel something other than bereft. 

He wishes he could feel the weight of John’s body on his. He wishes he could reach out and touch John’s hair, his cheek, twine his fingers with John’s and hold on tight and never let go. He wishes he could feel this thing he’s been robbed of, this precious sun kissed gift that weighs nothing and feels cold and came too late. 

-

Alex always feels half underwater these days. He loses track of the days and the years, spends them all with a mouth that tastes like a muddy river and enough tears for two people. 

Longs for the other half of his soul on the other side of the mirror.

Writes and writes and writes, ink stains on his hands and wrists and tear stains on his cheeks and the smell of smoke in his nose. 

-

Finally, his heart can take no more.

He wakes up in the sunlight in a field full of wheat and when he stretches out his hand his fingers touch John’s. 

John twines around him and Alex chokes on a sob.

“Shhh,” John says, right into his ear. Neither of them shudder. “You’ve cried enough for both of us.”

“I missed you so much,” Alex whispers, his voice hoarse. His ink stained fingers can’t touch John enough. 

“I know, my love. I know,” John whispers back. 

Alex kisses him, kisses that wounded mouth for the very first time, and he doesn’t taste whiskey or river water.

He just tastes John.

**Author's Note:**

> hello i don't know what this is why did you read it.
> 
> also i love comments they fuel me


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